FARMINGDALE, N.Y.óWith the goal of providing research
institutions and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies with a
cost-effective, high-performance platform for live cell analysis, Enzo Biochem
Inc. and BioTek Instruments Inc. have entered into a co-marketing partnership
that integrates instruments and reagent solutions.

The co-marketing agreement combines the state-of-the-art
fluorescent labeling and detection capabilities of Enzo's Life Sciences
subsidiary with BioTek's expertise in advanced liquid handling and fluorescence
quantification, producing an efficient workflow in which both hardware and
"wetware" work in concert to augment each other. The two teams will work
closely together, with both groups simultaneously benchmarking the
instrumentation and reagents in their respective laboratories. Enzo will
develop the fluorescent assay technology, while BioTek will optimize their
performance on the Synergy Mx instrument.

In the short term, the companies' goal is to provide a new
paradigm for compound screening and optimization in GPCR-based drug discovery.
Longer range, the Enzo-BioTek collaboration aims to provide a panel of
fluorescence-based live cell assays optimized for advanced microplate-based
analytical readouts. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The partnership was both born and launched on the industry
conference circuit. According to Dr. Wayne Patton, Enzo's chief scientific
officer, the companies' first discussions occurred in April at the 2009 Society
of Biomolecular Screening (SBS) meeting in Lille, France. BioTek scientists
were presenting a poster on their Synergy Mx monochromator-based microplate
reader, while Enzo scientists were presenting one on their new Lyso-ID Red
fluorescent cell-based cytotoxicity assay.

"We both appreciated that merging novel cell-based assays
with a high-performance microplate reader would provide a powerful combination
of attributes for customers interested in drug discovery and cytotoxicity
screening," Patton says.

The collaboration was formally launched in mid-October at
MipTec 2009 in Basel, Switzerland, with the presentation of the scientific
poster, "A cost-effective workflow for high-throughput screening of
G-Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs)." The poster details the use of Enzo's new
FluoForte Calcium Assay Kit for monitoring intracellular calcium mobilization
with BioTek's Synergy Mx Monochromator-based Multi-Mode Microplate Reader.

For BioTek, working with Enzo was part of its strategy of
raising awareness of its instrument capabilities and the advantages of various
reagent technologies by engaging in numerous collaborative projects with
various reagent vendors that cover all the company's products, says Gary
Barush, BioTek's director of marketing and sales.

"We have extensive collaborations with Promega, Invitrogen
and Millipore, resulting in numerous conference posters, application notes,
technical bulletins, peer-reviewed publications and co-marketing activities,"
Barush says. "We engaged Enzo Biochem as another collaborative partner due to
their interest in developing new proprietary live cell assays for microplate
instrumentation. Both companies realized that many cell based assays, such as
GPCR screening assays, are not accessible to smaller biotech and pharma
companies, or to academic laboratories, due to the very high entry cost
associated with purchase of fluorescent imaging plate readers, such as the
FLIPR and FDSS instruments."

The real synergy in the partnership is expertise in both
instrumentation and reagents, as well as a commitment to integrating both into
high-performance workflows that provide strong analytical capabilities to cell
analysis, Barush says.

"We believe that modest levels of compound screening can be
achieved with a simpler and lower-cost instrument, such as the Synergy Mx
instrument, combined with high-performance reagents, such as Enzo's FluoForte
calcium assay, to effectively meet customer needs," he adds. "A major source of
frustration for many researchers has been that selected assays were not
compatible with a particular instrument, and vice-versa. Our companies each provide key
expertise and capabilities in the live-cell analysis arena, bringing together
BioTek's capabilities in microplate detection and dispensing technology that
matches perfectly with Enzo's cutting-edge live cell analysis reagents and
kits. The result is a 'turnkey' instrument/reagent system which has been
fine-tuned for optimum performance."

Patton notes that historically, many assays performed in the
drug discovery area have involved endpoint approaches using fixed cells.
However, many pharmaceutical companies are now gravitating towards live-cell
assays, including the use of primary cells, tissues and even small animals,
like zebrafish, especially for toxicology applications, he points out.

"Live cell analysis offers two main advantages: First, it
provides a streamlined workflow that does away with the overhead of permeabilization,
fixation and secondary antibody incubation steps. Second, it offers the
opportunity to perform real-time kinetic analysis," Patton says. "This is
already well-accepted practice for certain benchmark assays, such as calcium
mobilization, cell cycle, cell migration and wound healing assays. The
challenge is to increase the number of assays that can be performed in a live
cell context. While probably less than a quarter of all cell-based studies in
the pharmaceutical industry are currently performed using living cells, we feel
that live cell analysis will ultimately be necessary to provide the requisite
detail needed to understand complex dynamic cellular processes."

Ultimately, the partnership will provide a range of tools to
help pharmaceutical and biotech companies optimize their preclinical and
clinical drug development programs through early lead drug identification, lead
candidate selection, predictive toxicology and compound characterization,
Barush concludes.

"Toxicity continues to be responsible for more than 30
percent of compound attrition during the drug development process, and remains
one of the major causes for drugs being withdrawn after their approval," he
notes. "Our assay workflows will provide robust and rapid in vitro toxicity screening approaches to identify compound
liabilities and STR (structure toxicity relationship) associated with new
chemical entities (NCEs), aiding in selection and optimization of NCEs in the
early stages of drug discovery. The results obtained from a menu of assays on
our instrument, with accompanying dose-response profiles, will provide better
understanding of the potential toxicity of compounds, and thus, facilitate
selection of compounds with the highest probability of success."